Dem-Created Dustbowl

Literally nothing is more malignant than liberalism, which is destroying our country politically, economically, morally, socially, demographically — and even physically. For example, liberals are deliberately reducing our most productive farmland to a dustbowl.

Instead of pink blossoms and green shoots along Highway 5 in April, vast spans from Bakersfield to Fresno sit bone-dry. Brown grass, dead orchards and lifeless grapevine skeletons stretch for miles for lack of water. For every fallow field, there’s a sign that farmers have placed alongside the highway: “No Water = No Food,” “No Water = No Jobs,” “Congress Created Dust Bowl.”

Locals say it’s been like this for two years now, as Congress and bureaucrats cite “drought,” “global warming” and “endangered species” to deny water to this $37 billion breadbasket through arbitrary “environmental” quotas.

It started with a 2008 federal court order that stopped water flowing from northern tributaries on a supposed need to protect a small fish — the delta smelt — that was getting ground up in the turbines of pump stations that divert the water south. The court knew it was bad law, but Congress refused to exempt the fish from the Endangered Species Act and the diversion didn’t help the fish.

After that, the water cutoff was blamed on “drought,” though northern reservoirs are currently full. Now the cry is “save the salmon,” a reference to water needs of the state’s northern fisheries.

Whatever the excuse, 75% of the fresh water that has historically irrigated California is now being washed to the open sea. For farmers in the southwest part of the valley, last year’s cutoff amounted to 90%.

“It’s pretty hard to keep crops alive at 10%,” says Jim Jasper, who runs a 62-year-old almond farm in Newman that employs 170. “That’s one irrigation, and trees take 10 to 12 over the growing season from March to October.” Almond trees cost $8,000 per acre and take six years to start producing, so farmers reserved their 10% allocation for mature trees first.

This means that future generations of trees are sacrificed, just as future generations of Americans have been sacrificed to B. Hussein’s monstrous deficits.

As for the smelt and the salmon, it goes without saying that liberals will side with fish against humans, but there’s more to it than that:

The cutoff didn’t kill just trees, however. It also devastated the area’s economy. Unemployment in some valley towns has shot up to 45%. Mortgage defaults are on the rise, and food lines are lengthening.

All major items on the Democrat agenda — radical environmentalism, healthcare nationalization, Cap & Tax, amnesty, the VAT tax, et cetera, ad nauseam — have a common objective. They are all designed to drive up unemployment. People are less worried about resisting tyranny when they are struggling to keep their children fed — which the government ever so graciously steps in to do with other people’s money.

Call it what it is: a man-made drought.

But if we do as we’re told, our rulers will let us have a little bit of our own water…

Much like organized criminals in big-city fish markets who see to it that product spoils when kickbacks aren’t forthcoming, Washington’s pols are now using their ability to turn water on and off as a coercion tool.

Take the three congressmen who represent the valley and how they were pressured to vote for President Obama’s health care bill. It didn’t go without notice by farmers like Jasper that the 5% water allocations announced in February for all three congressional districts were lifted to 25% for the two whose Democratic representatives, Jim Costa of Fresno and Dennis Cardoza of Modesto, switched their votes on health reform from “no” to “aye.”

Devin Nunes, a Republican from Tulare, wouldn’t sell his vote, and parts of his district had to make do with the 5% allotment.

To add insult to injury, leftist politicians denounce their victims as “corporate agribusiness” and blame the drought they deliberately engineered on the nonexistent global warming crisis.

Instead of growing food for themselves and the rest of the country, San Joaquin Valley farmers have been reduced to standing in line for government handouts of food grown in communist China.

When liberals yap, the adolescent malarkey that gushes out of their mouths is so nonsensical that you’re left to wonder what they really want. California farmers are starting to figure it out.